“When the caretaker service leaves in the evenings, they turn on the alarms and drop the keys off with mummy, so I picked them up this morning and came on up to wait for you. I have the alarm codes, so I unset them and waited, in the garden, actually; I’m not staying in this gruesome mortuary by myself, not for a big bloody clock!”
She’d reminded me of something.
“Rosie, how are your parents, how are Uncle Jerry and Aunt Sybil?”
Rosie looked sad for a moment.
“Daddy died, of a heart attack, nearly five years ago. It was sudden, but I don’t think he even felt it, which is a blessing, I suppose; at least he didn’t suffer. Mummy still lives in the same place, with my brother and me. Adam was born a year or so after you left, so you don’t know him, he’s at university now; he wants to be a banker, like Richard and Hugo, did you ever meet them?”
I was saddened to hear of Uncle Jerry’s death, and Lori and I both gave our condolences; he was always good at playing soldiers with me, I remember Aunt Sybil telling me he wanted a boy one day, I was glad he’d had a son. Also, my interest was piqued by her mention of Richard and Hugo; they were Aunt Sophie’s sons.
“I never did meet Richard and his brother, but I know their parents; Aunt Sophie was a witness when Lori and I got married in America; we’re getting married in church here, Aunt Sophie’s organizing it and Uncle Richard is going to give her away. I’d really like to meet Richard and Hugo; do you know how to contact them?”
Rosie smiled.
“Of course I do! They’re my cousins too, you know! They live in Chipping Norton, near all those ghastly media people, so not a million miles away; they stop by all the time to see mummy; they sort of keep an eye on her, help her out now and then, and Adam doesn’t have any student loans, so I suspect they’re paying for his uni; I know they paid for her to go on holiday last year; they’re lovely thoughtful boys, but they drive far too fast in those sports cars of theirs!”
Obviously Richard and Hugo took after their parents, and I couldn’t wait to meet them. But first, I wanted to introduce my lovely wife to my aunt Sybil, the only aunt I actually remembered well from my childhood, as I used to see her all the time, she and my uncle Jerry, father’s first cousin. All the other aunts were a collection of grim old gorgons whose reputation preceded them by quite a long way; I remember mother used to get quite vocal about some of them…
All I knew was, there was no way on this green earth I was going to let any of those poisonous old ratbags anywhere near my sweet wife; to do so would be to sully her permanently.
Lori looked enquiringly at Rosie.
“How did you recognise David in the papers? You said you last saw him when you were five years old.”
Rosie grinned back.
“David looks exactly like Uncle David; it really is quite amazing how much like his father he is; look, I want to show you something…”
She took Lori’s hand and led her into the study, where she pointed to the large framed painting over the fireplace. I felt a lump in my throat as I looked at my father again, as I remembered him when he used to swing me up and sit me on his motorbike saddle, Charlie and him laughing as I twisted the throttle and made ‘brrmm, brrmm!’ noises. He was standing with his hands on mother’s shoulders as she sat in front of the fire in the drawing room. I could feel my eyes stinging as I saw them together again, as I remembered them, so young and happy, mother’s hand on his as it rested on her shoulder. Lori reached out and took my hand as she gazed raptly at her mother again, young, beautiful, before so much had happened to change her world.
“Rosie’s right, Davey, it’s incredible; you look just like him!”she murmured. I just nodded, not trusting myself to speak. Rosie touched my arm gently.
“We heard about Aunt Jane, David, I’m so sorry; the trustees notified mummy that she’d been given Aunt Jane’s power of attorney here in England and handed all the keys and stuff over to her, and mummy’s been keeping an eye on the place since, wondering if you were ever going to come back.
Something seemed to occur to Rosie, as she turned to stare at Lori.
“And you look just like Aunt Jane; my God, you could be her twin, you look almost exactly like her!”
Lori moved to head this off quickly; Rosie was obviously pin-sharp, she didn’t want her drawing any conclusions just yet.
“I also look just like Aunt Sophie; apparently Denham men have some very particular tastes!” she grinned, drawing a smile from Rosie.
“I’ll say!” she agreed, “They say everyone has a double somewhere, and I think I’ve just met Aunt Jane’s! How eerie, especially in this frightful place!”
I was still staring at my parents’ picture; I’d only ever been back here a few times since I’d come back to England, mainly to sign paperwork once I’d reached eighteen, and never into the study; something had always kept me out, but now a wash of memories were bubbling inside me, of sitting at my father’s desk and playing with the boxes of painted lead soldiers kept in the window-seat, of standing on the window-seat when it was raining, peering out at the rain with my nose pressed to the window pane and wishing the rain away so I could go outside and play, and lying on the floor in front of the fire with my colouring book and crayons while mother, father and Charlie sat by the fire in the big wing-backed chairs and chatted.
The sound of someone knocking at the study door snapped me out of my reverie. Lori reached up and thumbed my eyes dry, then softly brushed my cheek for a second while Rosie answered the door, withdrawing in blushing confusion as Jimmy came in.
“Where do you want me to put the cases, Doctor Denham?” he asked, never taking his eyes off Rosie as she deliberately stared out the window. I decided to help things along a little, helped a little by Lori tapping my ankle sharply with the silver toe of her cowboy boot.
“Rosie, may I present James Roberts, Jimmy to his friends; Jimmy, my cousin Rosamund Fitzhugh-Denham, Rosie to her friends.”
Rosie held out her hand, Jimmy engulfing it his massive paw and shaking hands gently, almost as though he was afraid of hurting her. Rosie blushed again as Jimmy stammered and stuttered his way through an introduction, then turned to me.
“Where do you want the cases, Doctor Denham?” he repeated.
“Take them upstairs, Jimmy, I’ll give you a hand,” I replied, “and my name’s David, I thought we established that!”
He grinned apologetically as he picked up two cases, followed by me with two, Lori with her vanity case, and Rosie bringing up the rear carrying the dress case. We dumped all the cases in the master bedroom, and then I toured Lori around the rest of the rooms, deliberately leaving Jimmy and Rosie to have that excruciating first conversation that all couples who instantly fancy each other need to have but don’t know how to start…
While the two of them were hemming and hawing I took Lori down and showed her the rest of the house. Mother had decorated the drawing room, the main sitting room, and the dining room, as well as some of the bedrooms. The rest of the rooms were still as they’d been the last time my grandfather had the place decorated, probably sometime in the 1950’s.
Lori walked around examining and touching, looking doubtfully at the paintings of my ancestors, all of them with that strained, constipated look disreputable people have when they’re trying their best to look respectable, but I knew better; mother had given me the real background to most of them, not the official ‘family’ version, so I knew each one of those slave-trading, gun-running, mass-murdering, land-grabbing, pillaging, piratical rapists intimately. There were a few good ones, I had to admit, some philanthropists, scientists (or ‘natural philosophers’ as they liked to refer to themselves), and their collections and curiosity cabinets were still dotted the house, filled with collections of the odd, the strange, the weird, and the bloody scary, collected from all parts of the world. One of them, who fancied himself as an anatomist, liked to collect bones, and I still had the occasional nightmare about the time I opened one of the dozens of small doors in the attic and stumbled into a room filled to bursting with grinning skulls; my screams brought mother running, and the next day father had that door nailed-up; for all I knew, it still was.
I kept the biggest surprise for last. As we walked across the courtyard to what had been the coach-house back in the days of phaeton’s, gigs, and landau’s, Lori pointed out the new-looking barn behind it. The coach-house used to be father’s consulting rooms when he worked from home, and it had been kept spruce by the caretaking company.
There were two medium-sized bedrooms and a comfortable sitting room there, a self-contained bathroom, a kitchenette, and father’s old office, and I wanted to ask her if she’d rather stay there than in that echoing creep-show of a main house, but Lori was curious about the barn, wanting to know why it looked so new, so we went there instead. I explained that the trustees had built it, because of what was inside it. She was bursting with curiosity, so I undid all four locks, Lori remarking that it was unusual for a barn to have such a heavy door.